When a friend checked in on a Meituan employee late last month to see if he had survived the latest round of corporate culling at the food delivery giant, he responded drily: “I don’t know whether it will be me next.”

Anxieties were running high at the company then, after chat screenshots circulated on Chinese social media claiming Meituan planned to slash up to half of its product roles by the end of June, coupled with deep cuts to other departments.

While Meituan quickly denied the rumours, the viral speculation struck a sensitive nerve across China’s tech industry. Behind the online claims, employees whisper that a quieter, more insidious form of retrenchment has been under way for months.

For years, tech workers in China have harboured a deep-seated dread of the word youhua – “optimisation”. The term serves as corporate shorthand for painful lay-offs, often masked by euphemisms like “organisational restructuring”.

This year, however, the term carries a chilling new undertone. The increasingly urgent question echoing through office corridors is no longer whether a worker is performing, but whether their job can be done by artificial intelligence.

Meituan is far from an isolated case. From Baidu to Xiaomi, China’s technology giants have been trimming their teams, according to internal sources and tech recruiters.

The agents arrive